Mozillienne et Madame Michu

Archives Mensuelles: mai 2013

It has been a while since we did not give news about what was going on in the French speaking Mozilla community. Simply because so many things happened and because of that I did not have the time to write!

But don’t worry, I am not going into the details for everything (this is actually coming during the next months), I will give you a glance at what we were working on since January.

Then I know that some of you could – during these 3 months – follow the continuous news around Mozilla via these streams:

First of all: welcome to Jesus, Nigel, Darkkow, Marmoute, AxelR, Cédric Valmary, Rémi Caillot, Maxime Ronceray, Benjamin Bernard, Sphinx, angezanetti, Macadam, Sadouanouan, Idriss, Abdelsan and every one else I am sure to forget! (Apologies, I will catch up next month!)

And, hold tight: two countries just joined the French speaking community

– The Burkina Faso: Sadouanouan Malo and Idriss Tinto contacted us and are more than motivated to create one Mozilla community in this beautiful country. Sadouanouan is a professor and is currently working with Yoric to determine some bugs which he will be able to give to his students. Idriss is a computer science engineer, he is also in touch with Clarista and gerard-majax – our mediator here, thanks to him, a new community is being born. Together, they are thinking about how to set up a first event to found the community. Now, they already got their Mozillian’s profiles: https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/sadouanouan/ and https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/titinto/ .

– The Chad: thanks to Chahrawoods, we are now communicating with Abdelsalam Safi, a member of the ADIL (www.adil.td) whose goal is to promote the use of free software in Chad and thinks about creating the first Mozilla community in its country. What a good idea! We are teaming up with Chahrawoods and without any doubt, you will hear from us very soon. First things first: Abdelsalam is also officially a Mozillian: https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/abdelsalam.safi/ . Of course, both Burkina Faso and Chad can count on our indispensable Camara, leader for the Mozilla Senegal community and coordinator for the whole French speaking Western Africa to help and support.

Another event: Firefox is now localized in a new language! Cédric Valmary, newcomer, is working relentlessly so that our favorite browser works in occitan -a mailing list has actually been created for this specific topic: http://mozfr.org/mailman/listinfo/occitan ).

The events of the last quarter

You will have notice that, in January, the entire world celebrated Firefox OS with some hackathons. French speaking Mozilla has, of course, done the same.

In Paris (https://reps.mozilla.org/e/paris-firefoxos-hackathon/), the hackathon took place during the week-end of the 26th of January. The Gaia team from Paris made several conferences during Saturday’s morning to explain to the numerous developers that were here what were the basics to create web apps for Firefox OS (performances, design with the very convenient Building Blocks (http://buildingfirefoxos.com/ ), responsive design, which web API were ready to be used starting from now, etc.). Not to forget Tristan who motivated everyone and reminded the interest of applications using open web technologies. During the afternoon, after having eaten well among geeks, participants created groups in rooms to start the real thing: intensive programming for everyone, with the help of the Gaia developers if needed. (A lot of questions were especially about the systemXHR API and the web activities.) The real good atmosphere was rewarding and no more than 36 applications for Firefox OS were created in Paris this day.

If these days were successfull, it was largely thanks to Anne-Marie Bourcier, who put all of her energy and experience in organizing the event. She was our fairy godmother and we will all be eternally grateful for this.

One should also note that, in order to prepare this day, Pierre-Louis, FredB and Clochix added French subtitles on the videos about FirefoxOS. You can find these videos and all the useful links about FxOS on this Wiki page : http://wiki.mozfr.org/Paris_FirefoxOS_App_Days.

In February, like every year since 2003, Mozilla took part in Fosdem.The Fosdem (for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is simply one of the best event about FOSS in Europe: this is the place to be to know everything about FOSS development, to meet experts… and have fun!

Thus, the Fosdem took place during the first week-end of February in Brussels (Belgium), and amazing city with the best French fries of the world. Concerning Mozilla, this is Benoît, leader of the Belgian community, who took care of the event. Brilliant organiser, with an extreme patience, he made a marvel of this event. He was helped by Brian King, Ioana Chiorean, Axel Hecht, Ziggy Maes, Monique Brunel, Gervase and Teoli.

Overall, Mozilla excelled with speakers from everywhere, selling out meetings in Mozilla’s room but not only. Concerning the French speaking Mozilla community, Mozilla Belgium and Mozilla France were joined by Mozilla Senegal, represented by Camara, Mozilla Algeria, represented by Majda. However, it was a great disapointment and we cannot help but curse the things that stopped Melek, Sofien and Alexandre from Mozilla Tunisia to get their visas!

Let’s go back to February when Mozilla Maurice followed its route and organised a new Webmaker event for the children. Ganesh and Paméla are wonderful teachers and are already thinking about going in some other schools to launch a tournament.

From the 1st to the 6th March, French speaking Mozilla was proud to see Flore, Ibrahima and Ganesh taking part in the Webmaker training days in Athens: http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/tif

They are now our Webmaker mentors and will soon be able to teach every other French speaking Reps who are willing to!

Also on the 1st of March: strong coming back of MozillaIvory Coast and its enthusiast leader, Bacely Yorobi who went to EDHEC, a management school in Abidjan to present the different technologies of Mozilla.

« parrains Mozfr » : http://wiki.mozfr.org/ParrainsMozfr is a new system that has recently been implemented for new members. To tell you the truth, the system is still in its setting up phase and needs to be improved. We are still working on it and we shall let you know about further development. Do not hesitate to sign up!

Lastly, Transvision has not stopped its impulsive evolution from Pascal (changes by versions have been described at this page: http://transvision.mozfr.org/news/#v2.5 ), and as from now and onwards from Jesus! He has been inspired by the official theme of Mozilla to change the theme of Transvision, but the display of results has also been improved by creating an alert message for translations which seems to be abnormally long or short as compared to the original where the possibility of restoring a combination of languages/which is deposited by default via a cookie,etc.etc. Within a few months, Jesus showed himself to be indispensable to the community by providing several technical support (we need this!). In addition, he’s a cute boy! Thus, we are nominating him the Francophone Mozillian of this quarter! Jesus, you are most welcome among us! Thank you!